I’m a Sang-Mêlés, Acadien, a
registered Section 35 Aboriginal person. I have French/Mi'kmaw
ancestry. The Sang-Mêlés Acadien are the
oldest mixed blood people in Canada being established in the 18th
Century. We have persisted as an aboriginal people because our territory is
small, a thin band of communities along the western Nova Scotia shore, in
reality the size of a large Native reserve.
My clan comes from the territory known
to our Souriquois ancestors as Ke’pek. My mother called this place Cha’bake.
The word is the same Algon’kin root as Québec, the narrowing of waters. This
area is an open arm of the sea first explored by Samuel de Champlain in 1604,
which narrows to the Tus'ket River with Pomem’kook (Pubnico) on the eastern shore
and my family home Tus'ket Wedge (Wedgeport) on the western side. The area is the
traditional territory of the Souriquois, people now known as the Mi’kmaw Acadia
First Nation.
Three peoples lived on this land,
first, the Souriquois, then the confederated French/ Souriquois of the fur trade who became the
first Sang-Mêlés, then after the Expulsion the returned Sang-Mêlés, often refered to in historical records as the Acadian Militia. Our
families didn’t begin to marry outside of L’acadie Ke’pek until after the
Second World War, so the ancestral bloodlines are still strong and clearly
defined. We are the first mixed blood people in Canada. The Métis flag used in Canada
depicts a white infinity symbol on a blue background. The image is symbolic of
the idea Métis or historic mixed blood status cannot be extinguished. The Sang-Mêlés of L’acadie is
where infinity begins.
The history we embody is profound. As
well as being Sang-Mêlés the people of our clan are all directly
descended from three barons of New France, Claude Saint- Étienne de la tour, fur
trader, Cap de Sable, Charles Saint- Étienne de la tour, fur trader Castine,
Saint John, Governor of Acadia and Jacques Muise d’Entremont. Both Claude and
Charles de la tour were also baronets of Nova Scotia confirmed by King Charles l
of England and his successor Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
We diverge from the stereotypical
Acadian/Land of Evangeline people’s narrative, because we never left. Unlike
the pacifist Acadians who were deported to the British American colonies and
beyond during the Expulsion (1755), my people and our Souriquois cousins
escaped from L’acadie to Canada, which at that time was just across the border
at the Tantramar, (New Brunswick.) The Sang-Mêlés were a warrior class, we
waged armed struggle against Edward Cornwallis at Halifax; we were not passive
sheep gathered together in a church and lead onboard ships to exile. The Sang-Mêlés
fought when they could, then after the fall of Canada (Ville de Québec) in 1759,
gradually returned to their territory around Ke’pek after enduring the relocation
camps at Halifax.
This is an easily verifiable historical statement because the preponderance of Acadien surnames in our clan don’t appear in the lists of the deported at Grand Pré. The returned Pothier, Muise, Surrette and Duon all have historically acknowledged Native grandméres and we are only at the beginning of our genealogical investigation.
Actual proof of our existence as a
people lies in the government papers of Edward Cornwallis and his successors at
the Archives in Halifax. In Jon Tattrie’s, book, Cornwallis, The Violent Birth of Halifax, Pottersfield Press, 2013.
Tattrie details how official government minutes disclose the reservations of
paymasters who believe some of the scalps taken during the bounty were from the
Sang-Mêlés Acadien. We are fortunate such evidence still exists because of the
efforts of racist Land of Evangeline Acadians to write us out of history. We
can hardly blame our Native and Métis cousins for forgetting about us when our own
Québecophile Acadian historians and intellectuals prefer to deny our existence.
The passage from Tattrie is appended to this paper.
In 1847
American college professor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his epic
fictional poem Evangeline. This literary construction written in English
posited the Acadians as a pure blood, French speaking white race. It’s a
paradigm that persists to this day. Longfellow’s poem gradually began to be
taught in schools and embraced by the racist, colonial Government of Nova
Scotia, who enforced this artificial cultural straight jacket on the returned
Acadien. In two generations, with insidious help from the Roman Catholic Church and priests who falsified our living genealogies,
the Sang-Mêlés Acadien began to picture themselves as a lesser kind of racially
pure Québecoise. This absurd racist construction precipitated the final split
between the Sang-Mêlés and their Mi’kmaw cousins, who were even more
stigmatized and reduced to virtually non-human status compared to the Land of
Evangeline Acadians. Growing up in Halifax in the 1960’s I was aware French
speaking Acadians were a second-class people, socially above the Mi'Kmaw and indigenous
blacks only by virtue of their white skin. From this perspective
it’s easy to see why the Sang-Mêlés assimilated.
Sang-Mêlés consciousness is a
relatively new thing. Until our enlightened period of Recognition, Restitution
and Reconciliation Acadians were content to view themselves as a lesser kind of
Québécois, tucked away in their little corners of the Maritimes, the living
embodiment of Longfellow’s people of the Expulsion. This attitude was
underlined by both the Roman Catholic Church and an evolving Acadian
intellectual and cultural elite centered on College Sainte-Anne, a French language
Catholic undergraduate school founded in 1890 at Church Point, Nova Scotia.
Gradually histories of the Acadians were written, mostly by Acadian scholars in
Québec, some funded by separatist governments and predictably these historians
erased the Sang-Mêlés from their white supremacist histories.
The first authoritative history of the
Acadien, from which most of my narrative originates, was published by James
Hannay, a New Brunswick historian in 1879, little more than a century after the
Expulsion. In it Hannay frankly states the first Acadien were a mixed race
people and details the split between the pacifist pure blood Acadians, established by Charles d'Aulnay at Port Royal and Grand Pré and the activist old stock
Sang-Mêlés Acadien. Hannay’s history is now smiled on by Acadian scholars as
the product of an aggressive, racist Anglophone. Ironically the main criticism
of Hannay’s history is his supposed negative depiction of the Souriquois and
his conventional (for the 19th century) use of the word savage. I
can’t agree with this analysis particularly where Hannay quotes Samuel de Champlain’s history of
his visits to Canada and Acadia in the early 17th century. Hannay
obviously quotes Champlain extensively and uses the word savage as Champlain
did (sauvage) to infer a person or people who live in the wilds. Hannay does
later use savage in the conventional construction meaning vicious, but only
in the context of the French and Indian War (1754-63,) where my Souriquois
ancestors were indeed vicious and savage and waged a war of extermination on
neighbouring tribes aligned with the British. Otherwise Hannay, with a few
exceptions is very respectful of the Souriquois and describes them as having a
highly ordered society and presents our great ancestor King Membertou as a
thoughtful statesman.
The
secret of our mixed blood was so profoundly hidden that I had no idea I and we had
native heritage until I was in my thirties, then the dam broke with the
publication of Roland Surrete’s Métis/Acadian
Heritage 1604-2004 and the formation of the Eastern Woodland Métis Nation.
More recently, Sébastien Malette, et all’s, An Ethnographic Report on the Acadian-Métis (Sang-Mêlés) People of Southwest
Nova Scotia, has created a bedrock for the
Sang-Mêlés Acadien to reclaim an almost vanished nation.
Louis Riel acknowledged the Sang-Mêlés of L’acadie, writing:
“Quant aux provinces Canadiennes de l’Est, beaucoup
de Métis y vivent méprisés sous le Costume indienne. Leurs villages sont des
villages d’indigence. Leur titre indien au sol est pourtant aussi bon que le
titre indien des Métis du Manitoba.”
Translated, this reads:
“When
it comes to the Eastern provinces of Canada, many Métis live there persecuted
in the attire of the Indian costume. Their villages are villages of indigence.
Their Indian title to the land is, however, as good as the Indian title of the
Métis of Manitoba.”
extract from
Sébastien Malette, et all’s, An
Ethnographic Report on the Acadian-Métis (Sang-Mêlés) People of Southwest
Nova Scotia, 2018.
We are a small nation, but we are also undoubtedly the first mixed blood people of Canada. We have lived in our territory since the beginning of time. We hope our Manitoba Métis cousins will come to accept our friendship and in time look upon us as their family in the east.
I offer my best wishes and respect.
We are a small nation, but we are also undoubtedly the first mixed blood people of Canada. We have lived in our territory since the beginning of time. We hope our Manitoba Métis cousins will come to accept our friendship and in time look upon us as their family in the east.
I offer my best wishes and respect.
Eric Walker (dit) Pothier
